I had to mourn things I hadn’t known I’d lost.

Six years of hating my own body for a crime it never committed.

Six years of apologizing — to him, to his mother, to myself — for a failure that had been manufactured and assigned to me like a debt.

I had gone to sleep a thousand nights believing I was less than a whole woman, and every one of those nights had been a small robbery, and there was no court that could give those nights back.

On the drive home from Boston I watched the highway unspool and I cried, not for Cassian, not even for the marriage, but for the woman I had been for six years — the one who had believed them.

I wanted to reach back through time and tell her it wasn’t true.